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Whoever questions and even challenges God all the while desiring to obey His Word and listening to His silence, that person is a theologian.

Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, Great Souls, p. 356

True love does not result in obsession or possession, but in submission.

MOI

Those who give the most lip service to the sinfulness of this world are often those who most want to conserve the way things were 50 years ago.

MOI

The ultimate key to self-management is to ground your life in the love of God and others. Unless you do, you will continue to lead the breathless life.

Robert Ramey, Jr. The Pastor's Start-Up Manual

...God, the Maker of the world, is manifested to us in Scripture, and his true character expounded, so as to save us from wandering up and down, as in a labyrinth, in search of some doubtful deity.

John Calvin, The Institutes, bk1, ch6

The chief reason for writers' inarticulateness on certain subjects is the lack of experience or reading background that can stock their reservoir of ideas.

Edward P.J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric, p. 24

'The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.'

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years where we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Gandalf, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

Thorin Oakenshield, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 301

Jesus' preaching is in fact characterized by a large element of simple fact-telling, of simply telling people with authority what actually is.

Dale Bruner, The Christbook, p. 120

For in Christ neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything. The only thing that counts is faith working through love.

Galatians 5:6

The task of the theologian, like the task of the preacher, is to write theology in such a way as to persuade modern people.

John Leith, Basic Christian Doctrine, p.9

Were all sin now visited with open punishment, it might be thought that nothing was reserved for the final judgement; and, on the other hand, were no sin now openly punished, it might be supposed there was no divine providence.

19th October 2012

Wittgenstein once wrote, “‘Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.” The following quotes are collections of words which sound the common theme of Wirkungsgeschichte in my own mind. I hope they play a similar tune for you.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, p. 19-20

H.R. Jauss

“If one looks at the moments in history when literary works toppled the taboos of the ruling morals or offered the reader new solutions for the moral casuistry of his lived praxis, which thereafter could be sanctioned by the consensus of all readers in the society, then a still-little-studied area of research opens itself up to the literary historian. The gap between literature and history, between aesthetic and historical knowledge, can be bridged if literary history does not simply describe the process of general history…but…discovers…that properly socially formative function that belongs to literature…” H.R. Jauss.

“The readings, the interpretations and critical judgements of art, literature and music from within art, literature and music are of a penetrative authority rarely equaled by those offered from outside, by those propounded by the non-creator, this is to say the reviewer, the critic, the academic.” George Steiner, Real Presences, p. 12.

George Steiner

Georgia Warnke

“In confronting texts, different views and perspectives, alternative life forms and world views, we can put our own prejudices in play and learn to enrich our own point of view.”

Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason p.4

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Karl Barth

‘I have been called a ‘declared enemy of historical criticism’…But what I reproach them with is not historical criticism, the right and necessity of which on the contrary I once more explicitly recognize, but the way they stop at an explanation of the text which I cannot call any explanation, but only the first primitive step towards one, namely, establishing ‘what is said’…’ Karl Barth, Romans, 1921, p. x.

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Karlfried Froehlich

“‘Understanding’ a biblical text cannot stop with the elucidation of its prehistory and of its historical Sitz im Leben, with its focus on the intention of the author. Understanding must take into account the text’s post-history as the paradigm of the text’s own historicity, i.e. as the way the text itself can function as a source of self-interpretation in a variety of contexts, and thus through its historical interpretations is participating in the shaping of life.” Karlfried Froelich, Church History and the Bible in M.S. Burrows and P. Rorem (eds), Biblical Hermeneutics in Historical Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991, p. 9)

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Andrew Thiselton

“It is not enough to establish past ‘facts’ about the text once-and-for-all; it requires successive engagements with successive readers to bring out its potential meaning in interaction with a series of horizons.” Anthony Thiselton, summarizing Jauss, in Thiselton on Hermeneutics, p. 293.

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“…Gadamer acknowledges a degree of stability in the role of communal judgements, and in the corporate transmission of traditions. Even if a ‘classic’ yields a plurality of actualizations, it belongs to cumulative traditions of acknowledged wisdom (phronesis). p. 8 Thiselton on Hermeneutics.

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Henry Venn

“…Henry Venn of the Church Missionary Society…argued that the fullness of the church would only come with the fullness of the national manifestations of different national churches…”Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History, p. 12.

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Dr. Andrew Walls

“Perhaps a comparative history of translation would be an illuminating way of approaching the history of Christian mission and expansion-not only in the geographical and statistical sense of the spread of the Church, but the dynamic expansion of the influence of Christ within the Church that comes from attempts at the radical application of his mind within particular cultures.” Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History, p. 30.